Ontological sense
Paradigms are models or frameworks, structured for observation and understanding, which shape both what we see and how we see it. They are perspectives of looking at realities or ‘frames of reference’ with which we organize our observations and reasoning. The ontology of interpretivism was relativist, meaning the situation had multiple realities, which could be explored, made meaning of or reconstructed through human interactions between the researcher, the subject of the research and among the research participants. ‘Truth’ was contextual, with reality being socially constructed through people’s personal experiences in social, cultural, personal and historical contexts. Thus, context was integral for knowledge in any systematic pursuit of understanding.Positivism formed an integral part of the Enlightenment tradition: science and facts opposed metaphysics and speculation; faith and revelation were no longer acceptable as sources of knowledge (Ritzer, 2003). In this paradigm, the epistemology was objectivist, its ontology naïve realism and its methodology experimental.